by Dan Latus
A team, then. Big enough to cope with most things.
‘One had an ear-piece, and was speaking into the sleeve of his jacket. A microphone, I think.’
He nodded. They were well-tooled. And no doubt getting instructions while they were on the move.
‘Did you recognize any of them?’
‘Maybe the one speaking,’ she said slowly, frowning. ‘I could have seen him before. I’m not sure.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘The usual.’ She shrugged. ‘They were hard men. Perhaps aged in their thirties. Experienced, I would say. And very fit, and strong.’
‘I was lucky,’ Jake concluded.
‘Yes, you were.’
‘Thanks to you, Magda.’
She just shrugged. All in a day’s work. He really did wonder about her.
They returned to the hotel, brought each other up to date on their enquiries and took stock. Thanks to the car park caretaker, Jake had more to report than Magda. Basically, she had struck out at the other two taxi companies, as he had with the one he visited. Even pleading her case as an abandoned wife searching for her husband had elicited nothing more than unwanted cups of tea.
‘Ugh!’ she said with a shudder. ‘The tea was terrible. Very, very strong – and full of milk.’
He grinned. Magda preferred her tea weak and with a slice of lemon.
‘You’re just not used to a working man’s tea.’
‘And I hope I never will be. So. Tell me what you learned.’
‘Nothing from the taxi office. On the way back, as you know, I decided to call in at Freddie’s old flat again. It’s empty now. That woman has gone.’
‘You went inside?’
He nodded. ‘Even though I didn’t have a special key made by Mr Phan, I managed to get inside. But I found nothing new. Then as I was leaving the building, I saw a man sweeping up at the entrance to the underground car park. I had a chat with him. He works there, looking after the car park. I asked him if he knew Freddie. Turned out he did. Great pals, apparently. But, sadly, Freddie had moved out, and he didn’t know where he is now.’
‘How would he know Freddie?’
‘He’s a car enthusiast.’
‘Who is – the man or Fat Freddie?’
‘Fat Freddie.’
‘But the woman in the flat said he didn’t have a car.’
‘She was wrong. Mistaken – or lying. The car park attendant told me a lot about Freddie’s car. It’s a bit special, apparently.’
He told her the rest of the tale. She listened without interrupting.
‘So what are you thinking?’ she asked when he’d finished.
‘I’m thinking you can hardly drive a car anywhere these days in England without being photographed and subjected to automatic licence plate scrutiny and recognition. I’ll ask Bob to see what he can come up with.’
Bob said, ‘You’ve got the reg number?’
‘Yeah.’
Jake pushed the piece of paper he’d written it on across the table, avoiding the small pool of beer that had gathered in the centre of the table. Bob studied the slip of paper, seemingly looking for hidden meaning in the string of alpha-numeric characters.
‘Beamer, eh? I wonder why we hadn’t picked that up?’
Jake didn’t know if he meant the car or the number, but he shrugged anyway. He could have suggested Bob simply didn’t know the right people to talk to, but he didn’t. It might have upset him. He prided himself on being an old-school copper who knew the streets.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Bob said, carefully folding the slip of paper and putting it away in his pocket.
‘So there’s a chance?’ Jake asked, knowing the answer but prepared to give Bob the opportunity to demonstrate his professional knowledge and expertise.
‘A very good chance. Cameras are everywhere these days. Nigh on every car in the country is probably photographed nearly every day of the year.’
He paused and looked around with interest. ‘This your local?’
‘Never been here before in my life.’
The Elephant and Duck was just a pub he’d spotted when he’d been looking for the taxi company.
‘I thought you’d be able to remember the name without me having to write it down for you,’ he added with a grin.
‘Cheeky bugger! Still… Silly bloody names a lot of the pubs have these days, don’t they?’
‘Not like the Red Lion or King’s Head, you mean?’
‘Aye. You’re right.’ Bob gave a weary sigh. ‘So where are you staying, now you’re in London?’
‘Nowhere in particular. And nowhere for long.’
‘Meaning you don’t want to tell me?’
Jake nodded. ‘There is that. I’m not telling anyone. It’s safer. Fogarty had another go at me yesterday. At least, it was probably him.’
‘Here? In London?’
‘Yeah. I’m no safer here than I was in Europe. He’s got a long reach.’
Jake told him about his narrow escape from the car park, without mentioning either Magda or Kunda. He still wanted her to remain invisible and unknown. Kunda, too, for some reason. Some things he wanted to keep to himself for now. Instinct told him it was safer that way. He would trust no-one. Even the folk on his own side could leak.
‘We’ve got to get him,’ Bob said, looking grim. ‘Fogarty, I mean. We can’t go on like this.’
Jake couldn’t agree more. He just didn’t know yet how they were going to do it.
Chapter 37
Bob phoned early the next morning.
‘He’s been spotted,’ he said without preamble. ‘At least, the car has.’
‘Ah! Where and when?’
‘Every fucking where! It’s been seen hundreds, thousands, of times in the past few months.’
Jake nodded with satisfaction, and with growing excitement.
‘I can’t tell you where he’s living, mind. The sightings have all been on main roads.’
That made sense. Jake thought for a moment and said, ‘What sort of data have you got? What form is it in?’
‘It’s a list of places and times, and a spatial distribution map. Interestingly, the map shows a heavy concentration in north-west London. So that’s probably where he’ll be living.’
‘North-west London?’ Jake said with a smile. ‘That cuts it down a bit.’
‘Yeah, well.’
‘Email me what you’ve got, Bob.’
‘It’s on its way, bonnie lad!’
Exciting times. Jake took one look at the map that came through on his phone. Then he went out to find a printer. Having a physical map on a sheet of paper would be better, but he also wanted one on a much bigger scale, preferably one with street names.
With a Google search, he found a print shop just a few streets away. So off he went. Happily, they said they could produce what he wanted, once they understood his need.
‘It’s for a school geography project,’ he explained to the man running the machines.
‘Yeah? So what are the dots?’
‘Places where a road accident has occurred in the past year.’
‘I’d have thought there would have been a lot more than that.’
‘Oh, these are just the fatalities and serious injuries,’ he improvised, hoping the guy didn’t question him further.
‘It might be worth doing this with pubs?’ the machine operator suggested.
‘In case there’s a correlation? Drink-driving, you mean?’
‘No. Just the pubs. In case there’s any we don’t know about,’ he said with a grin.
‘Right. Good idea. Then we could tick them off as we visit them.’
‘And have two sets of plans. One showing all the pubs, and the other showing the pubs we’ve visited.’
‘And a third one,’ Jake said, entering into the spirit of the thing, ‘showing those we haven’t been to yet.’
‘Now you’re talking!’
Back at the hotel, Jake unfolded
the map and together with Magda, pored over it. Where they had to concentrate was immediately clear.
‘The Harrow area,’ he said. ‘That’s where most of the sightings have been.’
‘As far from Essex as you can get, and still be in London,’ Magda pointed out.
‘Makes sense, doesn’t it?’
They managed to narrow it down quite a bit more, using a variety of methods, but they were still left with a pretty big area.
‘Somewhere in here,’ Jake said, using a marker pen to describe a circle on the map, ‘is where Fat Freddie is living – hopefully. Let’s see if we can find him before Fogarty does.’
They started driving around the streets, ticking them off on the map, one at a time. They were looking for an elderly black BMW, possibly still with the reg plate they knew about. Maybe it would be parked out on the street. Maybe. Forlorn hope, probably, but they had to do something while they waited for a better idea to strike.
After a couple of hours they gave it up.
‘This isn’t going to work,’ Jake said with a reluctant sigh.
Magda agreed.
‘You probably thought that all along?’ he suggested.
‘Yes, I did. We need some other way, some better way of finding the car – or this Freddie.’
‘I can’t argue with that. Any suggestions?’
‘Perhaps we should return to the hotel and talk about it,’ she said with a smile. ‘Anyway, there are better things we could be doing than this.’
His feelings exactly.
One of the better things to be doing was to climb into bed, reactivate their love life and relax. Since arriving in London they had been on edge, racing around like a tornado, and now the storm had petered out. Exhaustion and disappointment, frustration as well, had come together to stop them in their tracks. It was time to recuperate.
They made love in a gentle, unhurried way. Took their time and rediscovered each other. They had always been good together in bed, and so it was now, too. Magda was especially attentive to his preferences, and Jake managed for a time to put aside all his reservations about her. He still didn’t trust her. He wasn’t going to forget how she had deceived him, but equally he wasn’t going to forget how they had always been with each other.
Thinking about it logically, he knew things had been pretty good between them back in the Algarve, even though their respective histories had been unknown. It hadn’t troubled him then. Why should he be so bothered now that he knew so much more about her? Did he really think she was still working for Kunda?
He didn’t know. Perhaps it was simply that he did know so much more about her now, and wasn’t entirely sure that she really had swapped her allegiance. Kunda had obviously played a big part in her life. Was all that over, as she insisted? He couldn’t be sure. But logic said he should just accept the present, as he used to do, and forget about Magda’s history.
Logic. He gave a wry smile. That wasn’t the answer to everything. Look where he was right now! But what he could do was keep a little bit of himself back, just in case, even though he knew Magda had saved him back at Freddie’s old flat. Embrace life, but beware of the unsavoury possibilities it had to offer. That would have to do for now.
‘What are you thinking, Jake?’
‘What a difference a day makes,’ he said with a smile.
‘A good difference?’
‘Very good,’ he said, nuzzling her neck.
‘Oh!’ she said, rising to the challenge. ‘You remember what I like.’
He grinned and did it again. Then one thing led to another, all over again.
Afterwards they lay together quietly for a while; in Jake’s case, listening to the faint sound of traffic in the busy street beyond the heavy curtains, and trying not to start whenever a door slammed somewhere as the maids went about their business.
‘What shall we do now?’ Magda asked sleepily.
He yawned and removed his stiffening arm from beneath her head. ‘Phone for room service?’ he suggested. ‘Order some lunch?’
She giggled. ‘Lunch? What time is it?’
‘I have no idea, but I’m sure they’ll find us something, whatever the time is.’
‘You’re hungry?’
‘A little. Peckish more than hungry. But I wouldn’t mind something to eat, and a bottle of beer to go with it.’
‘Is there beer in the mini-bar?’
‘I think so – unless you’ve drunk it?’
She giggled again and sat up. ‘Order lunch for us, then, while I have a shower.’
‘What would you like?’
‘Anything,’ she said, slipping out of bed.
He ordered a couple of omelettes, and salad and a bowl of wedges to share. It was while he was doing that that he suddenly thought of a sure way of finding Freddie’s car.
Chapter 38
He took some finding, Fat Freddie. Hendrik’s contact said he’d dropped out of sight, like all the others in Witness Protection. They were just gone.
‘We pay you good money,’ Hendrik pointed out. ‘Find him.’
‘It won’t be easy.’
‘Find him. You’ve got a week.’
‘I don’t know if…’
‘You’ve got a week,’ Hendrik said, ending the call.
‘He’ll find him,’ Hendrik said. ‘They’ve got resources we don’t have.’
‘Yeah.’ Fogarty sighed and looked morose. ‘Not like the old days, is it?’
‘Computers, you mean?’
‘Computers, online – and all the rest of it. Mobile phones and Facebook. Fucking Twitter! You don’t do Twitter, do you?’
Hendrik laughed. ‘No, but I would if it was useful.’
‘Useful?’ Fogarty scowled. ‘How much of it – any of it – is useful?’
‘Well, like I said, I don’t use it myself. But if those we pay good money to can find out what we need to know, why not?’
‘You’re too modern, Mike.’
Hendrik laughed. ‘What do you want to do instead – try to beat it out of somebody?’
‘Now you’re talking!’ Fogarty said, laughing with him. ‘So is this guy going to come up with Freddie?’
‘He’d better. He won’t get much enjoyment out of the rest of his life if he doesn’t.’
‘Pleased to see you haven’t gone soft while I’ve been away,’ Fogarty said, still laughing.
Hendrik’s expectations were justified. A few days later, the paid man came back with an address.
‘You’re telling me he lives there? For sure?’
‘Well, he owns it. I haven’t been there to check it out, though. I don’t do that sort of thing myself.’
No, of course you don’t, Hendrik thought. You just sit on your arse and play with your fucking computer!
‘How did you find it?’ he asked.
‘That’s a professional secret.’
‘How did you find it? I want to know if it’s worth me checking it out.’
With a big sigh, the caller said, ‘You wouldn’t understand if I told you. Basically, the computers found it. I fed them a name, and they scanned for it.’
‘Clever.’
‘Not really. It’s just what we do here.’
Hendrik nodded. ‘OK. Thanks.’
‘I can’t do this sort of thing very often, you know. Somebody might pick up on it. You understand?’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry about it.’
When he told Fogarty, Fogarty gave a grim smile. ‘If he’s right, this once will be enough. You should have told him that.’
‘We don’t want him sleeping easy at night, do we?’
‘No. That’s true. Cheltenham, eh? Nice place, Cheltenham. I used to like it there in Gold Cup week.’
Fogarty thought about it, frowned and added, ‘I always used to wonder what they did in that big place on the edge of town. GCHQ, or whatever they call it.’
‘They look for terrorists – and Fat Freddie!’
Fogarty chuckled. ‘Useful conta
ct, that guy.’
Hendrik nodded. ‘I don’t use him very often, but at times like this he’s a good investment.’
‘Well, let’s go and see if he’s right.’
Chapter 39
Jake knew he should have thought of it earlier. Freddie had been gone from his flat many, many months, and in that time there was a very good chance that his much cherished BMW had needed a tax renewal. Possibly an MOT, as well.
Freddie would be aware that police cameras could identify un-taxed vehicles electronically these days, and that such vehicles were often traced and stopped. He wouldn’t want that to happen to him. Yet he would also want to use the car from time to time. He wouldn’t want it just to sit in a garage somewhere for him to look at and polish. That wouldn’t do the moving parts any good at all.
To stay legal, Freddie would have had to report a change of address to the DVLA. He would have been on dodgy ground otherwise.
Time to phone Bob again.
It was a fine mock-Tudor house in a tree-lined street, a much superior residence to Freddie’s old flat. Well-maintained, too, from the look of it. Not a rental property. So he must have bought it. Used his own money, or a small part of the missing twenty million quid.
Perhaps he’d even had the house all along? Successful career guys in his line of work often prepared well in advance for retirement, or for the day when the wheels came off, which they usually did in the end. Now, with the help of Bob and the DVLA, they had found it at last.
They sat in the car for a few minutes, assessing the situation. Nothing happened.
There were no lights on in the house, and nobody came or left. No sign of the car, either.
‘I wonder if the car is in the garage,’ Magda said eventually.
‘Perhaps. Or he might be out in it somewhere. Anyway, it doesn’t look as if anybody is at home at the moment. I’ll go and take a look. You stay here.’
‘No. I will come.’
‘It’s raining,’ Jake pointed out.
‘If you don’t want me with you, just say!’
He smiled and shrugged. She was recovering. Back to her old self. As prickly and pushy as ever. Maybe she thought he was going to scoop the money and run – without her.
‘Come on, then. Let’s go.’
It was a wet night, and the trees and shrubs in front of the house were dripping sheets of icy rainwater. The distant Algarve seemed more alluring than ever. Jake pulled up the collar of his coat. Magda shivered, but he didn’t feel sorry for her. She’d had the chance of staying where it was warm and dry, and safe. Now she would just have to put up with it.
